Mitt Romney, Glenn Beck, and the Other Side of Truth

Somehow, the notion that anything is true, or that the truth has any real political value, has been leached out of our public affairs. Moreover, and probably as something of a result of that, the notion has arisen that anything which commands an audience must be worthy of the respect we would ordinarily give to the truth, no matter how demonstrably fraudulent or obviously mendacious it is.

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Exhibit A: the ongoing campaign of Willard Romney for president of the United States. (Did you remember that tomorrow is Pennsylvania Primary Day? It's Newt's Last Stand! Have you laid in the cold cuts for your party?) There was a great deal of talk from the gobshites over the weekend about how Romney will now "pivot" away from the very conservative position he has taken during the primary process and move toward the center now that he is the de facto nominee of the party. That this will undoubtedly be a toweringly truthless exercise, and completely of a piece with his toweringly truthless public career, seemed unworthy of discussion. This is surpassingly odd.

As he money-bombed his way to the nomination, and to name only three of the issues driving this election, Willard Romney has already taken positions on the economy, on reproductive choice, and on immigration that not only mark him as an extremist on those issues but also are so at odds to varying degrees with the positions on those issues that he previously said he held — and, indeed, positions that he acted upon while governor of Massachusetts — that there ought not to be any way for him now to walk them back without being held up to extensive public criticism, and to extensive public ridicule. (This morning, bizarrely, my man Chuck Todd described the president's campaign as being unsure whether it should attack Romney for being an extremist or for being a flip-flopper. The very logical notion that the man is both — that he has flip-flopped so far to the extreme end of his party that he'd have to be Olga Korbut to get back — seems not to have occurred to him.) This, at least, should be the function of the press. Every attempt by the Romney campaign to "moderate" the candidate's stated positions should be treated at least with a measure of skepticism.

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Instead, it appears as though the whole issue is going to be treated as a matter of whether or not the tactic of abandoning those positions for which you abandoned your previous positions works or not. Romney's ungainly ideological fandango is going to be judged on style points, rather than on whether or not the man has the intellectual honesty to park your car, let alone be president of the United States. I'm old enough to remember the peddling of several "New Nixons," and we still ended up with burglars in the Watergate and a few million more dead Asians. There is absolutely nobody who can tell you right now on what principles Willard Romney will govern — not even, I suspect, himself.

This was all triggered by a piece in Vanity Fair by Todd Purdum in which Purdum discusses the current activities of former cable-television sideshow freak Glenn Beck, who apparently has cut out the middleman and is fleecing the suckers directly himself these days. For Purdum, however, the willingness of the suckers to be fleeced is proof enough that Beck is something more than merely a "showman." He is nothing less than a prophet. You think I'm kidding? Gaze in awe:

Glenn Beck is a full-time pre-millennial prophet predicting, if not the end of days, at least something like a new Dark Age, with a collapsing global financial and political system and an onslaught of Evil Forces that will require an every-man-for-himself mind-set to survive. If he had lived in the first century A.D., Beck could well have displaced John of Patmos as the author of the biblical book of Revelation, that bizarre, brooding, apocalyptic amalgam of seven seals, seven stars, and a lamb with seven horns. Like other prophets who have appeared over the centuries to answer disordered times with disordered visions, Beck promotes a patchwork of internally inconsistent beliefs that defy definition. He blows hot. He blows cold. He espouses love. He arouses anger. He scorns. He cries. He presents facts-and falsehoods dressed as facts. He peers down into the bottomless pit of satanic Babylon-where we are today!-then up at the bright promise of a new Jerusalem, to which he can lead us. He is not like Rush Limbaugh (at heart, a showman, whose recent sliming of a law-school student as a "slut" demonstrated just how quickly such big talkers can cause themselves bad trouble). He is not quite Sarah Palin (at root, an opportunist) or Ron Paul (a quirky ideologue) or Rick Santorum (a severely doctrinaire Catholic), though he shares supporters with all of them. He is not even, as he sometimes takes pains to say, a clear-cut Republican. But he is, nevertheless, the emotional embodiment of the grievances and paranoia that define the domineering wing of the Republican Party in this political year. And to understand them, you have to understand him.

He is elsewhere in the piece compared (twice) to the author of Revelations. It is hard for me to go on after that.

Look, Glenn Beck is a charlatan. He was a charlatan yesterday, he is a charlatan today, and he will be a charlatan when the Last Trumpet sounds. His politics are gobbledegook and what he knows about actual history you can put in a thimble and have room for The Christmas Sweater. (Cleon Skousen, his intellectual mentor, was such a raving loon that the Goldwater campaign threw him out.) More to our point, Glenn Beck will continue to be a charlatan no matter how many people listen to his program, or buy his books, or attend his public nervous breakdowns. That the suckers actually control a major political party in this country is indeed a story, but not the story that Purdum is telling here. It is the story of a party — and, perhaps, of a country — that has completely lost its mind, that is no longer able to distinguish truth from lies, and that no longer cares what kind of poison it's being sold as long as it goes down easy. Willard Romney and Glenn Beck are both manifestations of what happens when our institutions fail us because we fail them. They are the monsters that walk on the other side of the truth.

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